Robert Bullard in “Dumping Dixie” explains the importance of environmental justice. Throughout these chapters he examines the role of race and income on such justice, or lack thereof. He presents evidence that only those within the upper or middle classes and/or Caucasians participate in environmental movements. Bullard explains that the existence of a racial divide and income differences create injustice for those less fortunate and more importantly, Bullard argues, those of color.
I found it interesting to compare the environment that Bullard writes about to other ideas of nature that we have touched on in class. As Bullard stated in an interview, “the environment is everything: where we live, work, play, go to school, as well as the physical and natural world.” Bullard strongly argues that the environment is all around us and therefore man is a part of the environment. In previous readings, such as Jack London’s “To Build a Fire,” man was among nature or the environment, but was very much so a separate entity merely living among it. He was disconnected from nature and eventually did not survive the environment in the story. This suggestion of mans disconnect from nature interested me because Bullard seems to argue there is a disconnect between man and nature but only in terms of rights and justice. As he states, the environment is nature and it is where we live. It should be important and therefore there should be justice for all to obtain a good, livable environment.
I also enjoyed comparing the visual images from Amy Stein’s photography album to the ideas of environment illustrated by Bullard. As previously stated, Bullard argues that the environment is where we live rather than just some place we envision as nature. Amy Stein often highlighted humans and their environment, such as fenced off areas with a house and a girl in them, and contrasted those areas with “nature” images of trees and containing wild animals. I thought it would be very intriguing to have such visual images that represented Bullard’s ideas of man against environment. For example, a black man photographed in his backyard with a power plant in the background or something of the sort.
Interview: http://www.ejnet.org/ej/bullard.html
You bring in a lot of good points in this post. It is interesting to see how much Bullard relates to Cronon's definition of nature, especially with the quote that you chose to post. Nature, as Cronon argues, isn't just that mystical edenic place that we visit, but rather it is always around us and we are a part of it. I found this reading to be extremely interesting, especially because it provides such compelling statistics. "For example, when Atlanta's ninety-four uncontrolled toxic-waste sites are plotted by zip code areas, more than 82.8 percent of the city's black population compared with 60.2 percent of its white population were found living in waste-site areas." This is an amazing statistic and it is so frightening to think about the unfair environments that these groups of people are forced to live in. Hopefully, since this article was written quite a few years ago, those statistics have improved, because everyone deserves a clean and healthy environment in which to live.
ReplyDelete-Justin
Thanks for your post, Jordan, and your comment, Justin. What really frightens me about the statistic Justin quoted is less the unequal distribution of waste exposure, but rather the fact that more than half of both the white AND black populations are exposed to waste-site areas!
ReplyDeleteJordan: I really like your imaginative comparison of Amy Stein's photography to Bullard's potential visual documentation. On the one hand, we could compare the photos to what Bullard does include in the chapters you read, i.e. charts, graphs, and maps with sites located on them. On the other, we could, like you did, envision an alternate series in which environment was less trees and water and animals than pollution and man-made structures.